The Boy by Betty Jane Hegerat

your mind here. It’ll blow over.”
    Blow over, and maybe Jake’s questioning will have been enough to deter Danny. Meanwhile she’ll speak to Mrs. Schultz. Go over tomorrow with a thank you card for the booties and hat the old woman crocheted for Jon.
    Jake walks to the window. “I wonder where that kid got to. I’m going to go for a drive and see if I can find him.”
    When the baby is asleep in his basket again, Louise returns to the clippings. She’s skimmed the newest pieces, an Edmonton Sun series written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the murders. How bizarre, she thinks, to be holding an anniversary for a gruesome murder. The man who wrote the piece didn’t hedge. He thought the wrong man had been hanged. Louise thinks suddenly of her dad, how she wishes she could ask him if he remembers this crime, and what he thought. She’s sure that if a court of law said it was so, then for her dad it would have been so. Black and white, or at least as dark a shade of grey as it took to make a judgment. She is also sure he would have said, “Hindsight’s 20/20, Louise. Everybody’s a Monday morning quarterback.” She wonders about her mom, whether the name might flick a switch and illuminate one of those patches of long ago memory that occasionally surprise Louise when she visits.
    The older pieces are worn at the folds, as soft as flannel to the touch and most of them marred by the dark stain on the envelope in which she found them. A cup of coffee? Young Brenda’s bottle of coca-cola splashed across the collection? From what she knows of Brenda, Louise imagines her frowning, blotting the envelope, looking for a new one to replace it with. She riffles through again, looking for the headline that clutched her by the throat just as Jake came through the door. “Place Usurped by Hated Stepmother. Spoiled Son Turns to Crime.” Robert Cook was hanged for murdering his father, stepmother, and their five children. Jake is right. Even though the headline is ridiculously sensationalist, worthy of a grocery store check-out tabloid, this is gruesome. She should throw it all away. She piles the papers onto the back of a shelf at the top of the bedroom closet.
    Jake’s visit with the Sunday morning coffee crowd prompts a phone call from Phyllis on Monday morning. She’s planning a baby shower. What day would be best? Jake works evenings all week, they have only one car, Phyllis lives about five miles out of town, and it’s a problem to leave Daniel home alone in the evening. But Phyllis is dauntless. One of the women from town will be happy to give Louise a ride, and Dan of course is welcome to come along. He flatly refuses. Boring, he says. Phyllis is from the traditional Mennonite side of Jake’s family. No television or computers in their house. The kids, Dan says, are “dorky” and the farm is a drag and Paul, Phyllis’s husband, is mean. He made Dan help with chores when he spent a weekend at the farm right after Jon was born.
    After Dan’s griping, Jake agrees that the boy is old enough to stay home alone. He’ll try to get away from work early.
    By the time the innocent little party games have been played, the gifts opened, the spread of sandwiches, pickles, dainty sweets set out with coffee which Louise is sure will keep both her and the baby awake well into the early morning, her face aches from smiling. Fortunately, the woman she’s ridden with is anxious to leave. She stands at the window fretting. “It’s raining dogs and cats,” she says, “and I left clothes out on the line.”
    â€œYou’re brave.” One of the other women pauses from collecting cups and carrying them to the sink. “I don’t hang anything out anymore unless I’m right there with the broom handy.” She turns to Phyllis. “We’ve got a laundry snitcher in town. All sorts of unmentionables disappearing